Speaker: Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst)
Title: “On Sayings and Rumors”
When: Friday, December 5th, 3:30-5pm
Where: 32-141
Abstract:
The work presented in this talk is part of a bigger project that tries to derive the distinctive properties of attitude ascriptions and speech reports from a pool of recurring building blocks that combine and recombine to produce a wide variety of constructions. The focus will be on ’that’-clauses that modify nouns like ‘rumor’ or function as arguments of verbs of speech like ’say’. I will look at the internal make-up of those clauses, and investigate how they combine with nouns and verbs. The key to understanding their properties, so I say, is to recognize left-peripheral modal operators – maybe in combination with reportative evidentials – as their most important building blocks.